Turbulent boundary layer pressure fluctuations at large scales

The pressure fluctuations underneath a turbulent boundary are an important excitation source for noise and vibration for both aircraft and ships. This presentation describes experimental results from a new study of flat-plate turbulent boundary layer pressure fluctuations in water at large scales and high Reynolds number. The experiments were performed at the U.S. Navy’s William B. Morgan Large Cavitation Channel in Memphis, TN on a polished flat plate 3.05 m wide, 12.8 m long, and 0.18 m thick. Flow velocity, skin friction, surface pressure, and plate acceleration measurements were made at multiple downstream locations at flow speeds ranging from 0.5 m/s to 19 m/s for a Reynolds number (based on downstream distance) range of several million to 200 million. Dynamic surface pressures were recorded with 16 flush mounted pressure transducers forming an L-array with streamwise dimension of 0.264 m and cross-stream dimension of 0.391 m. Measured 99% boundary-layer thicknesses were typically of order 0.10 m. Results for spatial and temporal correlation functions, as well as auto- and cross-spectra are presented and compared with prior lower-Reynolds-number results using either inner or outer variable scaling. [Work sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and ONR Code 333.]